Some recent pushback has come from a surprising source, which is the experimental defense against misleading claims, cherry-picked facts, and false statements.
A warning label has been triggered by several posts by theentrepreneur since he took over the social networking site. The rejoinder stated that the reverse is true and cited statistics showing the platform to be a small player.
The warnings came from a unique experiment in crowdsourced fact-checking called Birdwatch that began last year but was deployed on the social networking site in October. The pilot seemed to catch the new owner's attention.
In the same week that he made deep cuts to Twitter's workforce, Musk found time to change the name of the project Community Notes to improve information accuracy on the micro-blogging site. The team seems to have survived the transition. Musk has the ability to change how social platforms work if he sticks with the project.
The WIRED staff uses the social media platform to communicate.
Community Notes has a simple design that makes it difficult to protect the truth online. Once a user joins the project, they can propose that a short note of context be added to any tweets.
The helpfulness of the note can be rated by other people. The best note is automatically selected to appear on the post when a famous account like that of Musk posts a sleazier than usual message.
It sounds like it's more likely to create problems than solve them. The crowd makes social media so partisan. The decision to surface notes was made not by selecting the most popular, but by the consensus. That approach was inspired in part by a platform called Polis, which is used in Taiwan to crowdsource the creation of new laws.
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